More Articles

The Columbus school district has temporarily stopped billing suburban districts for millions of dollars they paid for the 26-year-old Win-Win agreement, which called a truce to the urban district’s attempts to annex land in the city of Columbus that was being served by suburban schools.

A re-examination of the complex deal has been ongoing since 2010, after officials discovered that some suburban districts had paid the Columbus district too much and others not enough, officials said yesterday.

Also, changes by the state in the way districts were able to tax businesses’ tangible personal property, such as factory equipment and store inventories, have made the business properties that stayed in suburban districts under the agreement less valuable.

After two years of secret negotiations, the problems were first publicly revealed this week in a five-year financial forecast by Columbus schools Treasurer Penny Rucker. Columbus will get no money from the agreement this school year, it said.

“Legal issues have complicated our calculations in how the Win-Win agreement should be computed and paid for in FY12,” the forecast said.

In 2010, the district said it collected $6.3 million a year from the 1986 peace accord. Rucker said Thursday that the district should begin receiving money again next school year, but the amount likely will drop to $5.5 million annually for the next four years.

The Win-Win pact allows areas of the city of Columbus to remain in nine suburban Franklin County school districts. Typically, when a city expands in Ohio, its city school district expands along with it. But that didn’t always happen in the 1950s to 1970s, when Columbus was rapidly annexing township land and the school district didn’t always follow suit. The district began threatening in the 1980s to retake those areas.

The Win-Win settlement, named after a negotiating technique, ended that fight.

One issue is that, when the Columbus district does annex land served by suburban districts, it is supposed to rebate money to the suburban district, said Anthony Swartz, the treasurer of the Groveport Madison school district. “That’s never been (done), and that was totally overlooked.”

Swartz took over as treasurer in 2008 and began asking questions about Win-Win in 2010, when it was up for its six-year renewal, he said yesterday. “I asked a lot of questions about it because I really didn’t understand it. I just got told every year, ‘We’ve got to pay (the Columbus district) a million dollars.’

“I think I just got a couple of people scratching their heads.”

South-Western schools Treasurer Hugh Garside said that the state’s elimination of the business tax for equipment and personal property threw off the formula used to calculate payments, and the formula is being reworked. He thinks South-Western will owe the Columbus district money when all is said and done.

Canal Winchester, Dublin, Gahanna-Jefferson, Hamilton, Hilliard, New Albany-Plain and Westerville schools are also parties to the agreement.

In the past, the payments to Columbus schools have equaled 1 percent of the increase of the assessed valuation since 1986 for commercial property in Win-Win areas. Payments are capped each year. In 2010, Dublin, Groveport Madison, Hilliard and South-Western paid the maximum amount — $1,050,000 each.

Their payments essentially protect commercial and industrial parcels — those that deliver dollars but no kids to teach — from being annexed by Columbus schools.

“To not have Win-Win means some of our commercial and industrial property would be at risk,” Dublin schools Treasurer Stephen Osbourne said in 2010.

The flip side of the agreement is that any land annexed by the city of Columbus after 1986 automatically goes into Columbus City Schools.